A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Dec. 2:..with our noses in our bellybuttons.

Russia and the U.S. are at war. That's what Syria is about. The U.S. equipped and financed a 'rebellion' against the government of Assad because American oil companies want control of Syria. And when you create a rebellion, that's an act of war. But the rebel army has not done well. That's why the U.S., while talking big, has not done much to stop ISIS. In fact, it has permitted others, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey to assist ISIS.

When you supply money, weapons, or other help to get others to fight a war for you, that's called a proxy war. But it's still a war. The U.S. does not want to destroy ISIS until ISIS has destroyed Syria. And that's no longer likely to happen. That's why Germany and Britain and France have been invited to join the war. They aren't needed to defeat ISIS. They're needed to create some semblance of a western world ready to make sure Russia gains nothing from its intervention.

The U.S. wants Assad out. That's why it has refused to join initiatives for peace talks. The U.S. priority is to kill Assad because he's not a puppet to the U.S. oil industry. That's why it won't even consider him staying in power until an election - or allowing him to run in an election. Democracy has nothing to do with it. The oil barons want control over who will governmen Syria.

Russia wants Assad to stay in power because it wants to maintain a strong link with Syria for both economic and political reasons. That's why it's in Syria now. And that's why Russia has done far more damage to ISIS than the U.S. has. (The U.S., in the light of the failure of the Syrian 'rebel' army, wants ISIS to kill Assad. Then it will get serious about destroying ISIS.)

For the U.S., this is war by proxy; but it is still a war between Russia and the U.S.

Meanwhile, the vultures are closing in. Turkey wants a piece of Syria once it's broken up. It's also helping ISIS by buying its oil, and auctioning it on the world market through a company owned by the son of President Erdogan. The profits from that oil are what ISIS uses to import weapons - also through Turkey. The U.S. allows all that to happen because it WANTS ISIS to win as the U.S. proxy in its war against Syria.

Meanwhile, most of our news media make it all fuzzier by their choice of words.
They speak of some 70,000 Syrian rebels. That's nonsense. No credible news medium (and there aren't many) believes that number. The so-called rebel army scarcely exists at all.)

The news media also constantly refer to them as 'moderate' rebels. What the hell is a moderate rebel? Until recently, I had never heard or read that term. This is simply propaganda code for "our side good. their side bad".

And, of course, the other side are terrorists. Saudi Arabia, which tortures, lashes, beheads on a grand scale, is never called terrorist. The U.S., which has been the world leader in the murder of civilians for at least fifty years now, and which tortures with enthusiasm, is never referred to as terrorist. Saudi Arabia, which is now hiring mercenaries notorious for rape, murder, looting, torture just for the fun of it, to turn the mercenaries loose on Yemen. It is contracting them from an American company which specializes in renting out thugs.

In the real world, Russia and the U.S. are now at war with each other - through proxies. Russia appears to be winning, and Putin seems to have been the most intelligent of the various leaders.

All we need now is for the U.S. to pull NATO into this mess. And Britain and France and Germany seem willing. And that's when the proxy war becomes traditional war. Then it will be just a short wait for ISIS to hit Britain and/or Germany - and watch the whole, western world go insane. And all this to please American oil billionaires.

Now, believe it or not, such a world war ( because that's what it would be) could affect New Brunswick. It could affect New Brunswick even more than the headline story in today's Irving press, "Denis Oland describes final meeting with father."

New Brunswick cannot afford to go on with its nose in its bellybutton. The people who lead us (the real ones, not the politicians) are indifferent to human suffering. And they work at keeping us ignorant of what is happening in the real world.

Today's Irving press does not have a word about anything of significance anywhere in the world. It has a total of three stories (count them three) about the middle east. Not one of them tells us anything that explains what's happening.
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It also tells us nothing about New Brunswick.

The opinion page, by Norbert and the editorial writer, takes an all too common tone. Both are about money. I would dearly love to see something about the needs of people in this province - and then talk about money. But it never happens.

Norbert, in particular, talks about the need to cut budgets and, as always, he never mentions the role of the very wealthy in this, and he never mentions what human needs must be served. I've seen nothing in this paper about the needs of school-age children. But the government plans to ignore those needs by firing teachers, and making classes bigger. In the same way, it plans to destroy the school as an essential centre for rural New Brunswick. And it plans to go on ignoring rural New Brunswick as it always has.

There's no thought given to hunger and little to housing. The Irving press seems to feel it's doing enough by publishing pictures of people holding up giant-sized cheques. Tell you what -next time Mr. Irving wants some money to buy a forest, cheap, or to get a grant or a loan, tell him to hold a raffle.

The result of all this is a city and a province that will do tremendous damage to children and the poor - but can find a hundred million for a hockey rink. (And please skip the nonsense that it will be profitable. If it were a sure thing to be profitable, can you imagine the owner of the team would allow us to build it? No. He would build it - and hit us for a grant to pay for it.)

Brian Cormier has a touching little story - but it's not a commentary. So it's not what this page is for.

Bradely Walters, a professor at Mount Allison, has a commentary of optimism about the Paris climate talks. I wish I could share that optimism. (The photo above the column is a photo of premier Gallant looking like a sci-fi god in Star Wars. It has nothing to do with climate change. I have no idea why it's there. I think they just had it - so it was cheaper than having a column there.)

This indifference to human need, coupled with the greed of the rich and their power to control government is going to lead to violence on a large scale all over the western world. Yes. It might even happen here. Certainly, our governments think so, and are preparing for it. I have seen many riots and many, huge demonstrations. But until I came to New Brunswick, I had never seen a line of camouflaged, militarized police armed with combat rifles. They were facing a crowd of at least hundreds.

What were they for? To shoot into a dense crowd of people? That's all they could be for. You can't pick your targets when it's a dense crowd, and you can't be a sniper standing up.

And when the premier babbled about how the native peoples in that crowd were an "armed camp", he must have been in hysteria. A few guns is certainly bad. But it's well short of an armed camp. And a line of riflemen, had they opened fire, would have killed many, many innocent people. I was astonished to see no reaction to this from the government or the public.

The intelligent decision would have been to stop the gas drilling operation, to stop it because the potential for disaster was far too great. It could then have gone to talks.

But this province would rather kill innocent people than annoy a billionaire fossil fuel driller.
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I have a whole bunch of sites to recommend, and they've been piling up. The first is one sent by a reader. I'm not familiar with it - but it seems logical.

Then there's the Nov.30 edition of Information Clearing House which is the best I've ever seen. Just google information Clearing House, and scroll down to November 30. In the opening section, the one with pictures beside the name of the source, almost all the writers have excellent credentials (I've been checking on them all.)

For today's edition (Sept. 2), I strongly recommend the first comment. (I think it's the first one, but I'm scared to check because I'm have computer problems, and checking seems to lose this site. I lost it many times tonight. And I have no idea why.)

I have other sites subject to the same problems as above. So you'll just have to trust me.

According to a senior military officer in the U.S., the current middle east crisis began with the American/British invasion of Iraq. He says this was the first step to the creation of ISIS. I'm not sure it was the first step. I rather think that happened with the American creation of al Qaeda to fight Russians in Afghanistan. But Iraq made it a sure thing.

Blair and Bush lied. There was no cause to invade Iraq - and they knew it. And before you say Hussein was a 'bad man', Blair and Bush were far, far badder.
They murdered over a million people, most of whom were not bad. Then they killed more in Libya, Afghanistan and Syria. They hanged Hussein. But those two men have committed war crimes in killing by the million and destroying whole nations.

They richly deserve to be tried and hanged. Instead, they have been made extremely wealthy, sought after as speakers, and welcome in any church. These men are the equivalent of Hitler - and his thugs that we did hang in a great show of righteousness.

We might say the same for thugs like Jed Bush and the others who wrote Project for the New American Century, The document was written to please oil barons and international bankers, and to kill and impoverish all over the world.

How can the Irving press carry denunciations of Justin Bourque while never mentioning the names of these indiscriminate mass murderers? How could our politicians have sent Canadians to kill and to be killed in support of this insanity?
And how can Canadians have accepted that?

And we have learned nothing. The belief that God wants the U.S. to rule the world is still a powerful one. It's the policy of all the Republican candidates and of Hilary Clinton.

Are the super wealthy so greedy they are willing to kill even more millions? Are they so insane as to risk a nuclear war? Of course they are.

2 comments:

Lets start off by admitting I'm not fan of J. Trudeau, although he is miles above the wannabe dictator we finally shed just recently. That ground rule established, I applaud his refusal to fly bombing missions into Syria. The only thing of consequence we were accomplishing in flying those sorties was to advertise our willingness to be an attack dog for big corporations, to kill innocents on demand and put us on the wrong side of history. Canadians have long been proud of their role in international conflicts, why rouse them from those misconceptions?

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep